5: On the shoulders of a wire coat hanger
By Niren Tolsi
Intro
Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles is a podcast that explores sounds, interviews, music, and even noises recorded during the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives. Over five episodes, journalists, artists, and researchers present mixtapes that reconsider archival recordings and reflect on their meanings in the present moment.
The invited collaborator for this episode is Niren Tolsi, a South African journalist, writer, and curator living in Cape Town. The title of his mixtape is “On the shoulders of a wire coat hanger”.
Mixtape
On the shoulders of a wire coat hanger
Archival reference no: BAB, TPA.43. 22, 26, 81, BD5.
Transcript of conversation
Melanie Boehi:
We are recording this conversation with Niren Tolsi in early July, 2024. Niren, thank you so much for making time and thank you for your mixtape.
Niren Tolsi:
Thank you, Mel. It was really an honour to work on this project.
Melanie Boehi:
Thank you. Niren, I want to start with a question about how you became a journalist. Is that something you always knew you wanted, to be a journalist?
Niren Tolsi:
No, not really. I enjoyed reading and writing. I started reading from a young age. I started reading newspapers from a young age, and that’s really down to my dad. So yeah, I suppose I developed a love for newspapers, but I didn’t really realise I wanted to be a journalist. I know when I was a teenager reading the art sections of newspapers, I wanted to be the guy who went to all the music gigs and wrote about it and got paid for that, or went to watch films and got paid for that.
Melanie Boehi:
And then what made you consider journalism as a career?
Niren Tolsi:
I suppose two things that kind of came together. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to study or to become or to do with my life. When I finished school, I was 17. When I was ready for university, I was still 17. So I figured, I mean, the best thing would be to maybe get away from the small sugar and paper milling town which I grew up in on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal as a 17-year-old and figure out the world. So as the cliché goes, I went somewhere very far away to find myself and pursue kind of the things that I was really enjoying as a reader and a writer, which was English and philosophy and politics and those kinds of subjects. But I figured I would follow that up with a serious degree at some point after that. The idea of journalism and storytelling kind of really grew on me at university, and I kind of realised that I’m the kind of person who would not be comfortable doing a routine job, like being a physiotherapist or a pharmacist or an accountant. And being able to get out the office was a major attraction of being a journalist. I mean, the other one was to be an archaeologist. I thought I could find some ruin somewhere and spend years just like dusting off scraps of ceramic.
Melanie Boehi:
There are some archaeological elements to your slow form journalism, one could say.
Niren Tolsi:
The excavation that gets done on some level.
Melanie Boehi:
And how did you start out as a journalist? Did you start out while you were still at university or when did you get your first journalism job?
Niren Tolsi:
The first story I ever published was still at university for a magazine that was aimed at youth called Student Life, SL. And it was actually a story partially inspired by Trainspotting, the film that came out in the year that I was at university and the story was published but also partially inspired by being a student and living in digs, the monthly travail of not having money to buy toilet paper. What does one do? And so I wrote this kind of funny piece about pursuing toilet paper all around Makhanda, which was then Grahamstown because I studied at the University currently known as Rhodes. But yeah, I mean my first job I started off kind of in Stanger where I grew up looking for a local newspaper, which in itself was interesting because I think the first week that I was there, I covered labour stories, which I was very close to, and you could see my gauche politics coming out. I was kind of ranting against the Mandela government for not protecting workers and of accusing them, of being Thatcherite, of being worse than Thatcher in the 80s almost of what was happening in terms of the Retrenchments in the agricultural sector at the time and the milling sector around Stanger. I mean the first story I ever wrote published for the Stanger Weekly was about the closing down of a sugar mill nearby and how the workers who’d been retrenched before Christmas had still not been paid their retrenchment packages. And it was the new year and not only had they had a shitty Christmas, but they’d also had, they were in a really precarious position when it came to ensuring that the kids were ready for school.
Melanie Boehi:
And then from there you moved to the Mail & Guardian?
Niren Tolsi:
No. The Stanger Weekly. I was there for about a month and then the editor was like, listen, I’m going to try and find you a bigger newspaper to work at. He used to work at The Post, which is a weekly Indian, Indian niche newspaper, which comes out on a Wednesday. So I freelanced there and he organised me an interview with the editor and I worked there for two years, earning 30 cents a word for any story that I published, but also 30 cents a word for any columnist whose column, you know, back in 1998, people would fax their columns through to the newspaper and you would type it in. And so I got paid 30 cents a word for typing in somebody else’s words, which was as much as I got paid for writing my own stuff. From there, I went to the Sunday Tribune where I covered arts and culture quite a lot. I was covering, writing a lot about sport, politics, anything really at The Post, at the Sunday Tribune, I wrote a lot more around arts and culture for five years. I did a lot of also menial work, which taught me skills around editing, around picture editing, around uniformity in text. But yeah, I realised that the sooner I got that out the way, the more time I had to do the fun things like do music reviews of live gigs or interviews with actors and people like that. But after four years of that, I got a bit tired and then I started writing feature stories for the Sunday Tribune. And then in 2006 I joined the Mail & Guardian, a newspaper that I’ve always adored.
Melanie Boehi:
A lot of your reporting focuses on social justice and the constitutional court. When did you start focusing on these areas?
Niren Tolsi:
So I started working a little bit on social justice at the Sunday Tribune when I was doing feature writing, and then when I joined the Mail & Guardian, I was the KwaZulu-Natal correspondence. So essentially I had free reign of an entire province to do whatever. I would dictate my diary. I had a really great news editor, Drew Forrest, and I worked from home. So I mean I could manage my time and I was very curious about this province. There were really interesting things happening here politically, culturally, artistically, in KZN. So I would try and do as many of the things that fascinated me as I could in a week for the Mail & Guardian. So I would cover the rise of Jacob Zuma because he was emerging around the time that I joined the Mail & Guardian and his mobilisation was centred in KwaZulu-Natal at that time before spreading out across the country before the 2007 ANC elections, but also social movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means people of the shacks, were emerging and the Mail & Guardian felt like, the editor at the time felt like they weren’t really covering ground up struggles as much as they had done historically.
So I spent a lot of time the shack settlements and that kind of sharpened my reporting on social justice. It also meant covering these kinds of things. Also, the socioeconomic rights which were enshrined in the constitution and which we are still kind of struggling towards. And we still are. I think these things were getting played out in social movements, in legal cases, et cetera. So in covering the province, I found myself reading a lot more about court cases, considering the jurisprudence of the constitutional court, et cetera. And that was my work until in the late 2009, early 2010 when I was seconded to work as the Mail & Guardian’s Work Cup correspondent because the football World Cup was happening in South Africa. And that job, if you know the Mail & Guardian kind of meant investigating social injustice, which is great in terms of investigative journalism, but not that great in terms of being a football fan.
So during the World Cup, I convinced my editor that, listen, for a year and a half I’ve been writing all these really important but kind of wet blanket stories about the World Cup and can I not have a bit of joy in my life? He agreed to let me cover the World Cup for the Mail & Guardian online. After the World Cup I was in Johannesburg and considering the work that I had done and the Mail & Guardian didn’t have a legal report at the time, I was offered the gig to cover the constitutional court and the politics of the judiciary as well as other beats.
Melanie Boehi:
And then since 2012, you have been covering the Marikana massacre and its aftermath. Could you tell us about how you got involved in that reporting?
Niren Tolsi:
So I was in holiday when the strike at Marikana was happening. I got back to South Africa the day of the massacre on that morning. You know the news cycle and production cycle of the Mail & Guardian, it’s a weekly newspaper that comes out on a Friday. The paper goes to bed at around six o’clock on a Thursday. The Marikana massacre happened, well, the shooting at scene one happened at eight minutes to four on that Thursday of the 16th of August, 2012. So I’d come back to South Africa having had a great holiday. So I was oblivious to the strike at Marikana and usually at the Mail & Guardian, once people are off deadline, they gather at this pub close by to the offices for a drink. So I’d gone there in the afternoon to meet with people that I hadn’t seen for a few weeks. And people came in literally shaking, and they described as much as they could what they knew of what had happened. It was evident that the country had changed forever. We had a few beers and people were still shaking. I went home and then when I got home, I watched it on the news for the first time, the actual footage of the shooting, which left one quite bewildered and traumatised. I think even just watching that and leaving you with the question of how and why.
So in the weeks that followed, obviously lots of journalists in Marikana trying to figure out what happened, what’s going on. And then after that, Paul, the photographer that I work with, Paul Botes, he’d gone off to a funeral as a funeral, started happening in Lesotho, and he was really stuck by, I mean all the mine workers and their families were marginalised economically, socially in terms of psychotherapy. In most instances they were actually criminalised by the state, but for the Basotho mine workers, they had even less kind of support than even the mine workers and their families who were being criminalised in South Africa.
So Paul went to this funeral at the Ntsoele family in Diputaneng. And Diputaneng is this area that you drive out of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, for three hours and then the road stops and then you park your car at a local school and you spend two hours walking, climbing through the mountain, either on foot or on horseback before you get to the village where Molefi Ntsoele is from. And he was really struck by this, but how marginalised this family was. And we had so many questions about our government and this compact that had been broken between people and the state and these echoes of past massacres in South Africa during the apartheid era that emerges with this massacre. Our impetus was to try and find out who these mine workers were who had expressed solidarity, not just with each other but with the future. Because if you go back to the forensic evidence, the films of the mine workers on the koppie, for example, when they respond to attempts to get them off the koppie on August 16th and they say, look, what we are doing is not just for ourselves. What we are doing are for our children and our children’s children, and we understand this as a struggle that we are willing to sacrifice our lives for. That is the ultimate sacrifice and expression of solidarity with the future. And it was quite a remarkable thing because it happened outside of trade union mobilisation. So that fatalism the reality of South Africa and mining, which still relies on migrant labour, this entire kind of economic system where we were as a country where all these were kind of annoying at us. And we figured, well, to understand this, we needed to understand who the men were, who the communities from which they came from were and how this affected those most intimately associated with the massacre, which was the family members.
So we started that and we realised that there was so much trauma to navigate and that there was a power dynamic as journalists, urban journalists of a particular colour and class that we needed to navigate as well, going into rural areas. And we realised that we had to take it really, really slowly because people were traumatized, much more so than we were. And we needed to be sensitive and deliberate and empathetic. So yeah, we slowed the process down and we figured we needed to keep returning to the families. And we didn’t think it would be 12 years. But this journey became a lot more significant because also as you delve deeper, it’s not just about the communities, it becomes about the sociopolitical cartographies of the widows as they move around, as they experience organisation on a political level within themselves. It’s about the intergenerational trauma that we need to reflect on. But also figure out are they shoots of hope in this violent rupture. And also navigate questions of like, does justice exist for people in this circumstance who are Black, poor, rural, and sad to say still marginalised by the state now. So yeah. So all of these questions have led us to 12 years on.
Melanie Boehi:
I mean, Niren, and then as part of this long journey, we’ve taken you on a detour in this project or on another stop along your journey, in journalism archives in Switzerland where we found quite a few recordings related to mining. There is a recording that is also used in your mixtape made in a mine in South Africa in 1975 where we can just hear machines. Then in Ruth Weiss’s sound archive, there are interviews that she conducted with people, political activists, around mining and strikes, but then also Andrei van Wyk, our sound artist and podcast producer who worked with you to develop the mixtape, he found some recordings in the archive of Radio Télévision Suisse made in mines in Switzerland, which weren’t included in your mixtape. But we’ve been listening to sounds of mining as we prepared your mixtape. So what do you make of a recording like the one made in 1975 in a mine somewhere near Johannesburg, when you listen to this now?
Niren Tolsi:
I think two things immediately. And one of them is something that I’ve been thinking about more recently because of a prompt. And it comes from this gathering that we had at Makhanda at the National Arts Festival where a Zimbabwean academic who’s written a book about post-apartheid studies was at this gathering and it was in a kraal setting, an imbizo almost. He talked about how he’d lost his grandfather and his great-grandfather to the mines where they’d come there as migrant workers and they would disappear. And I think a lot of Zimbabweans have these stories of fathers and uncles who come to South Africa to work on the mines and they disappear. And for him, when he navigates Johannesburg, when he comes up to Johannesburg and he sees the mine dumps, they’re not just eyesores, they’re also symbols of trauma which are laid with the dead bodies of people who’d mined, for the disappeared, who we search for, but we cannot find. Those mine dumps, now, I imagine them as a freshly filled in grave when you have that bank that kind of comes up before the tombstone is, and it feels like these gigantic graves. That’s the first thought which links up to the kind of subjugation of the Black body in the mining process, right.
The second one, and I think that’s something that you, Andrei and I kind of riffed off is that sound took me right back to Marikana and the shafts there and the story of the Jokanisi family. So Semi Jokanisi is one of the men, the striking mine workers who’s killed at Marikana, is killed on August 13th in a skirmish that the police trigger unprovoked with striking mine workers. In testimony before the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana Massacre, the police alleged that he was attacking one of their own and which is why he was shot dead. The forensic evidence objective forensic evidence refutes this. His body was found very far away from any of the dead policemen firstly, and in this melee, two policemen were killed and three striking mine workers were killed, Semi being one of them. So his body was found far away from any of the dead men. So he couldn’t have been shot because one of the dead men’s colleagues wanted to protect them from being attacked. And it’s certain that he didn’t crawl away from any potential attack that he may have been trying to do after being shot because he was shot in the spine, which means that he was incapacitated immediately. Now, this evidence is still being played out in court, but the forensic evidence in the criminal prosecutions, and it will certainly never be concluded, I think in the next 10, 15 years, it’s such a slow process.
But Semi got his job at Marikana because of his father Goodman Jokanisi, who was a mine worker there. Goodman’s father was a mine worker as well. And Goodman and Semi shared accommodation at Marikana. Such is the nature of extractive capitalism and the need for profit and productivity that their social moments didn’t happen in the family in the unit that they shared together. Their social movements happened actually in between shifts when they would see each other under one of the big mine shafts, and they would catch up and talk and then Goodman would go down to work, Semi would go home to sleep and they would meet again as they crossed parts, they had very little social time together at home. And that sound kind of took me back to that story because Goodman, after the death had to return to the mine. He had to walk past that mine shaft every day. He had to live with a new flatmate in the accommodation that he shared with his son. There’s a haunting there that I thought linked back to the haunting that we got from the audio. It speaks also to the mechanisation of people, the subjugation of people and the land and other things as well. But suddenly there was a strong echo there, which took me specifically to the Jokanisi family, which I think whose experience of Marikana and after the massacre is really interwoven into this mixtape.
Melanie Boehi:
And you also included a recording of Semi Jokanisi’s son, Ndikho [Bomela] Jokanisi, of a speech he gave at the AGM of BASF. Can you talk a bit about that?
Niren Tolsi:
Sure. I suppose to explain why Ndikho is in Mannheim in April at an AGM, we need to take a few steps back. So this Marikana journey has been significant because you really question the role and relevance of journalism in affecting change at a time when journalism globally and in South Africa is also experiencing a crisis of relevance and attention. And so obviously you reach points where you ask yourself the deep questions about what you’re doing and why and whether it matters at all. And certainly I’ve kind of realised that my journalism is enmeshed with other things including art making, which is why this series that you’re doing is so important, Mel, and I was so excited to be involved in it. But also in activism. And so for the last few years I’ve been working with a collective who have been essentially confronting the end of the supply chain with the beginning of the supply chain.
And BASF is the largest chemical company in the world. They’re everywhere but nowhere. They contribute to the environmental crisis at every step of the supply chain. They use 1% of the electricity used in Germany annually. They’re involved in selling pesticides, which are banned in the EU and in the global North. They produce monoculture seeds which limit biodiversity and contribute to the environmental crisis. They’re involved in creating green technology like batteries, but obviously these batteries involve extractivism. And in 2012, BASF was buying the majority of the platinum group metals produced by Lonmin, which was the company where the strike happened in 2024. They’re still buying the majority of the platinum group metals from Sibanye-Stillwater, which is the company which bought out Lonmin’s interest at Marikana. And they’ve signed onto all these clean supply chain agreements. They’re bound by German legislation around clean supply chains, but they do corporate deflection.
So through activist shareholder associations in Germany and a bigger network, we have created a network which confronts their dodgy supply chain to shareholders in the hope of affecting some change. So in previous years, we’ve had people like Bishop Seoka address the AGM and ask for change, or demand change. We’ve had surviving mind work as demand change. The widows of the dead men. And this year we took two children of the men who were killed at Marikana. One is Amina Fundi, who’s the daughter of a security guard. So she was one of the children and Ndikho was the other. And they addressed the AGM and reminded the shareholders that it’s been 12 years since the massacre and the conditions that exist in the mine have not changed at all. They’ve also reminded them that there’s been no justice for the families of the dead men and BASF abound ethically to at least facilitate some kind of change through working with Sibanye-Stillwater
Melanie Boehi:
As you are talking about redefining journalism for this age and in your case, kind of moving from journalism into the arts and into activism, and again, connecting that with echoes from these archives, I think the Ruth Weiss sound archives is very interesting in terms of listening to how she worked as a journalist. And her story is different as in she got into journalism after having had a career working in the insurance sector. So for her, journalism is a way, or it becomes a way of being part of a political struggle and contributing through her reporting, but also through her work in journalism education in Southern Africa.
Niren Tolsi:
Yeah, certainly. I think Ruth Weiss expressed profound solidarity in the areas that she worked with the people because I think she had a sense of struggle and defined a journalistic role within that struggle. And one which I think acknowledged subjectivity, right? Subjectivity in the sense of solidarity, of recognising humanity in the sense of having a well-defined sense of right and wrong, which I think we should still have as journalists. I’d like to think that my subjectivity, for example, nods to the South African constitution, which I think is an important document. But at the same time, I acknowledge that the constitution and the rights in there and the idea of incrementalist, legal pursuit of these rights isn’t as effective as I would hope it to be. There are gaps, and in my head I’m always kind of constantly trying to figure out, as much as I’m presuming Ruth was always being nimble in the sense of always figuring out how to move into these gaps, but do journalism, but do it with empathy and a sense of solidarity with other human beings, which is a very important thing. It comes back to this notion of love that Baldwin talks about, which is a state of grace, which is about curiosity and pursuit and kind of solidarity with human beings, not a facile idea of love as kind of personal happiness and contentment.
Melanie Boehi:
It’s different for each generation.
Niren Tolsi:
It has to be because the challenge that a different technology, different things change, and which is why there’s a nimbleness and a solidarity, which you can really use to redefine journalism in the 70s, but by the time 2020 comes around, you need to rethink it as well. But there’s certain things which are consistent, which I find in the two Ruths that I really adore, when the other one is Ruth First. And you can see in her journalism as well, I mean there’s so many similarities between the two in terms of, again, that solidarity with people. And it’s a ground-up perspective as well. It kind of fits into the idea that power isn’t hierarchical and it doesn’t exist only at the top with politicians and rich people. I mean, we understand that they wield power and it’s mainly destructively how they wield it, but in both the Ruths’ work, there’s an acknowledgement that power is so profound from the bottom up as well. And I think that is an interesting kind of curiosity that they both have as well.
Melanie Boehi:
And also another parallel there in your project of reporting about Marikana and in Ruth’s project of reporting about women in Zimbabwe, there’s this deliberate decision to come to terms with being an urban journalist and travelling to rural areas to sit down with people and to listen to their stories.
Niren Tolsi:
Yeah, look at the beginning of the After Marikana project, we were very lucky we got money from the Open Society Foundation and my editor at the Mail & Guardian at the time, Nick Dawes, was like, look, this is a very important story. You guys have the funding to hire, because the big thing was hiring a four-by-four because of how far away people lived in these rural areas, is so difficult to access, you’ve got funding to travel out there, I’ll give you time off news diary. Which was remarkable for an editor at that time because most editors would be like, okay, you can have three days every two months to go do this thing. And Nick was fine with us taking two week blocks away from our news diary and going away and working on this.
Melanie Boehi:
Let’s go back to the recording you used in your mixtape of the songs. Can you give us some background information?
Niren Tolsi:
Sure, sure. So these recordings come from an art making workshop, which we’ve done with Khulumani Galela Support Group, which again is a group of activists who centre their work around art making and reparations. And they include people like Judy Seidman, who’s this phenomenal artist and activist who was one of the founders of Medu in the 1980s. So she and Nomarussia Bonase and a few others had worked with the widows in this art making workshop where it’s essentially life-sized portraits of themselves. And it’s a body mapping process where the artists respond to prompts. In the case of the widows, what kind of future they imagine for themselves, how they imagine their loved one had died, et cetera. And a really, really powerful body of work emerged from that. And these recordings of the widows singing these songs of mourning were made during these workshops. And it is significant because the idea with Xhosa women or Pondo women is that they must mourn in seclusion, that they wear black and they spend months in mourning, depending on how traditionalist even up to a year in mourning. Now that’s interesting because that idea, actually, from how I understand it, comes from Victorian colonisation and Christianity spreading out.
So with our After Marikana project, we had quite a big exhibition and a public engagement programme at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, the 10th anniversary of the massacre. And so the widows’ artwork was combined with the work that Paul and I were doing to create a two site exhibition. There’s an interesting story there, which talks to silencing of especially of the Black female experience in South Africa. What happened was that, our exhibition space, which is controlled by the Department of Arts and Culture Eastern Cape, which is where Makhanda is, the gallery refused to remove these very kind of static portraits of four kings, which were staring into one of our exhibition spaces, which is quite a feminine, delicate space centred around the idea of home. We’d used Paul’s photographs, which I’d never seen so beautifully produced before. There was the widows’ artwork. We’d used furniture that you would find in a typical Eastern Cape home. We’d also collected family archive from all the families over this period of research. And we’d kind of used family archive photos in little frames, which we’d put on chests of drawers or coffee tables. And so we had paraphernalia and family archive, and it was a very sensitive space that we are trying to create. And these four men staring into our space was an intrusion. And I do believe at least one or two of them had been collaborators with empire. So there were issues there.
So anyway, we try to move around it because there was a refusal, the Eastern Cape Government, Department of Arts and Culture refusal to remove these portraits. So we kind of cut out the glare by using a movable wall and changing the installation. But we also thought it important to respond to traditional rural patriarchy. And a lot of it comes from the British codification of what they felt was traditional law and culture. And they did so in a way which obviously benefited the British and their colonisation and not Indigenous communities. So we needed to respond to all of these things. And what we did was we situated, so the chiefs, the kings’ portraits are over the stairwell, which leads into our gallery space. So on the stairwell, we used these audios as a response to the kings through to emphasise that these women were there, they were present, and they had voices, and they refused to be silenced because their experience after Marikana was of silencing even by the media.
The majority of the media would fossilise the widows as either mourning or constantly fainting and having no agency. Meanwhile, I mean, it’s 12 years, people have lives, they have agency, they make decisions, and there are complex humans who celebrate as much as they mourn. And all of that nuance was not being reflected in the media. They were not really following through on their lives and their stories, and they’d been silenced by the state. They’d been silenced and criminalised by various people. They had initially been even silenced by the Marikana Commission of Inquiry because at the beginning of the commission, nobody had thought to invite the families to be present at this hearing, and they were the most important people. And there was an immediate silence that was happening in the gallery, which we thought we would respond to. And then it led to another silencing because at the opening of the Department of Arts and Culture exhibition downstairs in that gallery space, we were asked to turn off the sounds of the women and their mourning because the MEC, the Provincial Minister for Arts and Culture, was going to give his or her speech, and the sound would bring down the party going on downstairs.
And sadly to say that that was successful for various reasons. And so again, there’s another level of silencing that happened. And this is something historically that goes back centuries. And it is something again that I think in the work of people like Ruth Weiss, there’s a response to that silencing. There’s an attempt to include the marginalised and the silence into conversations and to recognise the importance of their voices and their experiences
Melanie Boehi:
In your journalism, your medium is the word, so you primarily write. And then through these exhibitions, you also got more into visual forms of expression, collaborating with a photographer, this exhibition project in Makhanda. And now for the mixtape, you worked with sound. How was that experience?
Niren Tolsi:
It was challenging. I think there’s demand to listen, and my job is to listen and to tell stories. I suppose it’s a different kind of listening. With the Marikana stuff, I realised while listening to various parts of the archive and sound and things like that, that in my interviews I focus very much on who is speaking. I think I use my eyes to take in the environment, but my listening is focused on the people who are speaking. And with this process, I got to listen to not just the person speaking. It was a lot more going on around there. And that kind of then got me thinking about my own practise a bit. So that was interesting and it was kind of challenging and it certainly opened my ears up to actually push myself a bit more, I think. But sometimes holding space and listening is an exhausting thing, and you don’t want to stretch yourself too wide in terms of sensory overload, and then you end up getting nothing, right, because also that aspect to it.
Melanie Boehi:
The last question I want to ask you is about your thoughts about these archives, these recordings being in Switzerland. You know, these archives are clearly relevant for Southern African history, yet they’re kept in Switzerland, that not a lot of people in Southern Africa know about the existence of these archives. What are your thoughts about the location of this recordings?
Niren Tolsi:
Look, I mean, this is something that we’re struggling with, right? And this is something I suppose that needs to be built into reparations. I think reparations needs to happen at every level in terms of this North-South colonial history that we have. And obviously it’s a problem. It’s a problem as much as there are artefacts, everything is kind of situated and is skewed towards the North, from what has been stolen from us, to where funding resides and where we have to access funding, where information and archive resides, and how we access that. So I think there’s a reparative process that needs to happen. And I think these archives are part of that process. I mean, these things need to be made accessible to everybody. And if we’re going to talk about reparations and return, from artefacts to actual money to archive, I think, I mean, every aspect needs to be profoundly considered and democratised and paid back. And the idea is to pay back, and if you pay back, then I think there’s a step further than one goes then just say, look, stuff is online, get it. I think then you need to make a concerted effort to then understand, okay, with this archive, how do we actually start programmes to get these archives into the consciousness and usage of people who are affected by, for example, mining. How do we use them? How do we work with communities so that they can access these to understand the cycles of history and repression and struggle and networks that exist now and did then, et cetera? All these things that need to be fed in.
Melanie Boehi:
Well, thank you so much for this conversation.
Outro
The Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles podcast was developed by Melanie Boehi, in collaboration with Andrei van Wyk, Lynsey Chutel, Talya Lubinsky, Niren Tolsi, Belinda Zhawi and Percy Zvomuya. Sound design, editing and production is by Andrei van Wyk. Original archival recordings used in the mixtapes are subject to the regulations of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien Archives. The project “Echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives” was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation with a Spark grant. Thanks go to Ruth Weiss, Maggie Caroline Katsande, the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Radio Télévision Suisse, the University of Lausanne, the Swiss National Science Foundation and all contributors. We also thank Ndikho Bomela Jokanisi and the families of Marikana for contributing to this mixtape. For more information on the project, please check out our website: independence-echoes.org.
